I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag

by Jennifer Gilbert

  I told Bennett that I was sorry, and that I loved our friendship, which over the years had become one of my most important relationships. But I also told him that if he needed to break up with me as a friend for a while, I’d completely understand. Never for a minute did I want him to think that I was stringing him along in any way. As his friend, I wanted to tell him, Screw it, that girl doesn’t appreciate you, walk away. But since I was the girl in question, I didn’t know how to handle it. So I said the truth: “Bennett, I love you way too much to risk losing you for the sake of ‘romantic love.’ ”

  I didn’t hear from Bennett for a while after that; then he e-mailed me one day and said, “You’re still my best friend and I want you to be happy. If you love Evan and you’re going to marry him, then I’d better get to know him a little better.”

  Bennett knew that Evan loved hip-hop, so he bought the three of us tickets to see The Bomb-itty of Errors, which was a hilarious mash-up of Shakespeare’s plays set to hip-hop music and dance. It was clever, and perfect, and so thoughtful. And with this one gesture it showed me he was my truest friend. Despite his own desire and hopes for himself, he wasn’t making me choose; he would let me have both kinds of love.

  One day I was walking by a jewelry store, and I noticed a really cool ring in the window. It was Gothic and funky, and I mentioned in passing to Evan’s sister how much I liked it. Then I put it out of my mind.

  Our third anniversary was approaching, and we’d planned a trip to the Greek Islands to celebrate. Before we left, Evan presented me with a small, ring-size box, and my heart did a little leap. Even while my pulse was fluttering, Evan laughed and said, “It’s not the ring, but it’s the promise.” I opened it, and it was the funky ring that I’d admired in the window. I loved the ring, but my heart sank a little, and I tasted the all-too-familiar tang of disappointment.

  In Greece, while sailing around the islands, I made what I thought was a major concession. I suggested to Evan that we think about moving in together. I’d always said that I wouldn’t live with a man before we got married, but my whole relationship with Evan had been a process of slowly breaking all my own rules, and I was willing to make the compromise for him, if that’s what he needed.

  We continued talking about renting together after we got back to New York, but in the meantime I’d decided that I really wanted to own something. I got fixated on buying a weekend house in Rhinebeck. I was thirty-one years old, and I felt like I’d been working a zillion years, and I wanted a house to show for it.

  I wanted to believe that there was still a future for Evan and me, so I asked him to come with me to look at houses. I thought, When we end up together, it will be nice to have his input. We were touring around with a broker, and there was one house in particular that was quirky and completely impractical, but we both adored it immediately. Then Evan said, “Let’s do it, let’s buy this house together.” We got so excited we even named it. It was the “mushroom house.” It did feel a little like putting the cart before the horse—but I told myself that buying a house could be viewed as a kind of commitment. I consciously overrode my own instincts.

  With Evan, I’d allowed myself to dream of a fairy-tale happy ending. The thought of letting that go was devastating to me. It would be so much more than breaking up, it would be giving up. Eventually, though, I couldn’t ignore my instincts any longer. Although I was terrified of what it might mean for my future, I had to admit to myself that Evan was no more ready to commit to me now than he’d ever been. The plans and possibilities of that house were moving us forward, not his certainty about me. At Jenny’s wedding, I’d seen what real love and commitment were, and what Evan and I had was only a shadow of that. After yet another Saturday afternoon of going back to look at the mushroom house, I asked him to pull over the car. Tears were streaming down my face, and he looked at me questioningly. I said, “What are we doing?”

  Four simple words, but they cut right to the heart of the matter. We weren’t doing anything, and we weren’t headed anywhere. It was finally over—for good this time.

  I went into a hole for a long while after that. I was so tired of fighting for everything. I thought that there must be people out there who found love and a life worth living without needing to work so hard all the time. I wanted that easier way, but I still couldn’t surrender the fight.

  I had stopped seeing my therapist, Ann, but I knew that I needed her help again. I was back on one of my circular tracks, and I was afraid that without a little outside guidance I was going to keep on making the same mistake again, seeing a future where there was none. What’s the definition of an idiot? Someone who does the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.

  The first time I saw Ann, I told her the whole sad story of Evan. She calmly listened and then she said, “Jen, was there any point where you thought to yourself: Oh, this is not going to end well?” That question sank into me, and I had to admit there was. I think early on in our relationship, something inside me knew this was doomed. But instead of really experiencing what I felt in the relationship—which might have tipped me off that I wasn’t nearly as happy as I thought I was—I poured myself into making myself worthy of Evan’s love. I was looking for my goodie bag at the end, all wrapped up in a pretty bow.

  Ann helped me see how I kept upping the ante in my life. I had to constantly make life more difficult for myself. I could never take the easy road if there was a hard one. In fact, the easy road felt like cheating to me. Anything truly worth having must be difficult, right? Just as I’d thrown my life into chaos around the trial, and I’d constantly raised the bar by which I judged my self-worth, now I’d spent three years with a man I thought I was completely in love with, who’d never given me the slightest proof that he wanted to share a life with me. I started to ask some important questions.

  What did love feel like for me?

  What did I think love was supposed to be?

  I realized that I was confused about love itself. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew what I didn’t want. So until I could figure it out, I went to the one place that always healed me: my business. It had given me a new life after my attack and was there to give me shelter again. For the next two years, I did nothing but work and go to therapy.

  Over the years the economy improved, and we rose right along with it. My business shifted into two divisions. One was the free service we provided while being supported by our vendors. The other was back to a traditional consulting model, as half our clients wanted us running and organizing all aspects of their events, not just finding the vendors. Meanwhile, I’d been hearing from clients who did business in other cities that they were unhappy with their local planners. The tipping point was when a major Internet client of mine in Silicon Valley said, “What will it take for you to open a Save the Date® out here?” With one client under my belt there, I thought, If you build it, they will come. I sat down one by one with my sixty largest clients and asked them, “If Save the Date® was in another city, would you use us? And in which cities do you need support?” I proceeded to expand my business to a total of five cities within eighteen months. My staff members regularly flew to San Francisco and Los Angeles to produce our events out there with partnering agencies. At the same time I hired two MBAs, and we traveled back and forth between New York, D.C., and Chicago, rolling out the business in those locations, where I handpicked and hired all the local staff to form new management teams. I did $30 million in business that year.

  Then came September 11, 2001, and the world stopped. We were all in mourning, and the idea of celebrating became shameful. In the next few months, economic disaster followed; the Internet bubble burst soon thereafter, and even if there had been a desire to celebrate, few companies could afford the expense. My fledgling businesses around the country withered to nothing, and I was at risk of losing New York as well if I didn’t do something—fast. The choice I had was clear. I could
hang on to my dreams and expectations and lose Save the Date® altogether, or I could face reality.

  So in the course of forty-eight hours, I traveled solo to each satellite office, laid off all the staff I had so carefully hired, shut down the computers, and turned the locks on the doors. It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. I felt like an emotionless zombie—I probably seemed so cold and heartless to these dedicated women, but I could not let myself get emotional. It’s business, not personal, I kept saying to myself.

  When I got home I pulled the shades, lay down on my bed, and sobbed for two days straight. Every time I progressed forward in my life, it seemed, I always suffered a loss.

  During all the time that I thought about nothing but work, Bennett kept up his gallant efforts to win me over. But to me, he was just being my friend. If he wasn’t bringing dinner over to my office, then he was helping me with spreadsheets for my company or looking over my sales models.

  Everyone loved Bennett—my parents, my sisters, my friends. On a weekly basis, invariably one of them would look at me and say, “What about Bennett?” And I’d always say no, never. It would be like kissing a brother, I said.

  It’s not that Bennett wasn’t attractive—he was. But all the reasons that I loved him also frightened me. He wasn’t at all afraid of me, and he saw through all my masks and bravado. I could be totally vulnerable with him, and that felt wonderful in a friend—but scary in a boyfriend. I’d never had a relationship like that before, and I knew that if anything romantic happened between us, there were only two possible results: either it would ruin our friendship, or we’d end up getting married. And I wasn’t ready for either with him.

  Despite my discouragement, every week Bennett sent me something—lilies, orchids, a topiary bear, presents, perfume. I told him not to, but it made no difference to him. Once I was excited for him about a new girlfriend he was seeing, and he shrugged and said, “She’s just a placeholder.” I couldn’t help laughing. I said, “Bennett, not for nothing, but you might want to play a little harder to get, because this approach doesn’t seem to be working.”

  But that was the thing about Bennett—he didn’t play. He knew I wasn’t ready, so he gave me my space. But he never let me forget that he was there waiting for me, and he never gave me one reason to doubt that he always would be. He wrote me the most beautiful, openhearted love letters. He told me that he loved everything about me—and he noticed everything about me. And each letter he signed the same way: “I love you millions, billions, trillions.”

  Sometimes the heart leads and the head follows. In my case, my head and my heart were in competition for which should take the lead. When I felt ready to try a romantic relationship again, I reached out oh so tentatively, still afraid that I’d make the same mistakes. But nervous as I was, I knew I didn’t want to be alone forever. At some point, I was going to have to take another chance.

  Years before Evan, I’d dated a really tall, handsome man named Charles. He was an associate for a big accounting firm, incredibly smart, and I remember how it blew my mind that he could do calculations in his head faster than a computer. Back then he seemed a little young, a little immature, and after a few months we had nothing to talk about, so I broke it off. Fast-forward years later, we both were single, people mature, so I thought, Why not?

  Charles was even more attractive than I remembered him, and he had the same whip-smart calculator brain, had been promoted to Partner, but after about two months of dating we were right back where we’d been seven years before. The man had exactly sixty days of conversation in him, no more. Beyond that, it was an endless loop.

  Around this time, I went out for drinks with my good friend Laurie. She was among the very few who knew everything about my past. She also knew everything about my history with Evan, and Bennett’s unrequited love. That night she asked me how things were going with Charles, and I audibly sighed. I told her that I was coming to the unhappy realization that my version of love was a fantasy. There was no such thing as the perfect man, and if I kept looking for him, then I’d be alone forever.

  Laurie put her hand on mine, and she said, “Jenny, I love you, you are one of my best friends, but you’re blind. You have the perfect man in your life already. He’s right in front of you.”

  I looked at her blankly. I said, “Who? Charles?”

  If Laurie had been the type to smack someone in the head, she probably would have. She said, “Bennett, stupid. He’s the perfect man for you, and you just can’t see it.”

  That night, I laughed at Laurie’s suggestion, the same way I always did when someone told me that Bennett was my future. But the words sat with me, and they planted a little seed.

  Two days later, it was my birthday, and Bennett offered to throw me a party. He invited some close friends, as well as Charles, of course. Bennett’s lovely new girlfriend Isabella would also be there.

  The day before the dinner party, Bennett and I went out to lunch at a local diner, and he told me he wanted to give me my birthday present. He handed me a large black box with a lattice weave. Inside that box was another box, and on and on, each box getting progressively smaller until finally inside there was a jewelry box containing a beautiful pair of earrings—silver and gold with bright blue stones. I was shocked and blown away, and of course it was totally inappropriate. He wasn’t my boyfriend, and I absolutely shouldn’t accept them. But I did, because it was Bennett, and it made him happy to make me happy.

  The next night, everything about Bennett’s dinner party for me was perfect. It was the kind of evening that could only have been orchestrated by someone who knew me even better than I knew myself. He had all my favorite flowers—vases of lilies and bowls of floating gardenias. He knew I never touched a simple carb, so for dinner there was shrimp cocktail and veal chops. He knew that my no-carbs rule did not extend to alcohol, so he had all my favorite wines. And because he knew that I adored chocolate (no-carbs rule be damned), dessert was my favorite triple-chocolate cake from Black Hound Bakery.

  Bennett had designed every detail of the night with me in mind, and I knew why. It was because he still loved me, and he always would. And there he was with his beautiful girlfriend, and here I was with my handsome boyfriend. I can’t know what Isabella thought, but Charles didn’t even raise an eyebrow. It didn’t occur to him—not in a million years—that Bennett could be a threat.

  A day after Bennett’s exquisite dinner party, I planned to spend the evening of my actual birthday with Charles. By every possible standard, the evening turned out really, really badly. But in order to appreciate just how badly it went, it’s important to understand a few fundamental things that my nearest and dearest all know about me:

  1. I don’t collect stuff; clutter makes me nervous. All surfaces in my house are clean. I was a slob before the attack, but ever since I’ve been a neat freak.

  2. I’m a purist when it comes to chocolate. I never mix it with fruit—I don’t even like chocolate-covered strawberries.

  3. Scents are very important to me; they connect me with feelings and memories —especially after having lost my sense of smell for so long. I love perfume, and candles, and cologne on men.

  And here’s something it’s important to know about Charles: he was born without a sense of smell.

  On the night of my birthday, Charles arrived at my apartment with three wrapped presents:

  1. A Lladro figurine of a woman holding a birthday cake. Charles’s mother collects Lladro figurines. I do not.

  2. A box of chocolate-covered cherries. The combination of fruit and chocolate makes me gag.

  3. A bottle of perfume. This might have been a lovely gesture from a man who couldn’t smell it himself, but not only hadn’t he checked what perfumes I liked, but it turned out to be his mother’s favorite scent.

  I don’t know what kind of a happy face I conjured as I opened each of those off-target gifts, but i
t was convincing enough to carry us to the restaurant where Charles took me to dinner. Then it hit me: this man is gorgeous, but we have nothing—absolutely nothing—in common. Of course he meant well—but he just didn’t see me at all.

  Then, over dinner, Charles said something that I couldn’t forgive, and I couldn’t explain away. With a combination of derision and mystification, he said, “What’s Isabella doing with Bennett?” I knew Charles through and through, so I also knew right away what he meant, and it wasn’t kind. He wasn’t saying, What’s Isabella doing with Bennett when he’s so obviously in love with you? He was saying, What’s that gorgeous woman doing with that short man with the quirky wardrobe?

  I set my fork down on my plate and just stared at Charles in disbelief. This man actually had the nerve to feel superior to Bennett—my dearest friend Bennett, who was the truest, best man I’d ever known.

  That’s when the argument started. I’m sure Charles didn’t know what hit him, and he was still in the dark when we lay down next to each other in bed that night. As I heard his breathing deepen into sleep, I thought about how I was doing exactly what I’d been afraid of—I’d chosen a man who looked good on paper and not the man who felt right in my heart. If I didn’t stop trudging this same well-worn track, then the walls of my trench were going to be so far over my head that I’d never get out.

  I couldn’t even wait until morning to break up with Charles. I woke him in the middle of the night and told him it wasn’t working and he had to leave, and I meant right that instant. I packed up the three presents he’d given me, and I sent him on his way. He didn’t put up much of a fight, and I’m sure he thought I was out of my mind. But I wasn’t—for the first time in a long time, I was feeling quite clear and sane. I thought about all the times I’d tried to make someone fit into a perfect box for me, or how I had tried to make myself what another person wanted so that he would love me.